If Alan Greenspan Wants To ‘End The Fed’, Times Must Be Changing

FOR A LONG TIME, gold standard advocates in the United States have had differing viewpoints about whether a new gold standard system might take place with existing institutions, such as the Federal Reserve, or whether it would take place with new institutions, and the Federal Reserve would in effect be disbanded or rendered irrelevant, writes Nathan Lewis of New World Economics.

During the 1980s or 1990s, it seemed politically impossible to even consider a situation in which the existing monetary plumbing would be torn out and replaced with some “free banking system” or other such solution. The Fed, under Greenspan and Volcker, seemed to have a pretty good handle on things. The economy was doing well and people were enjoying a Great Bull Market in both stocks and bonds. This was not the time when you throw everything overboard for some goofy new idea…(snip)

…Let’s see what Alan Greenspan has been saying recently:

“We have at this particular stage a fiat money which is essentially money printed by a government and it’s usually a central bank which is authorized to do so. Some mechanism has got to be in place that restricts the amount of money which is produced, either a gold standard or a currency board, because unless you do that all of history suggest that inflation will take hold with very deleterious effects on economic activity… There are numbers of us, myself included, who strongly believe that we did very well in the 1870 to 1914 period with an international gold standard.”

In the same January 2011 interview, Greenspan apparently wondered out loud if we even require a central bank!….>>MORE(forbes.com)